Most of the problems I have with finding and keeping work rest in the reality of my autistic being. More specifically, that I am unable to maintain the cultural and societal norms expected in business environments. That these environments are unwilling to employ me is discriminatory, yes, but beyond this, a compelling proof of how and why our national competency, be that in innovation or even systematization is devolving.
My competencies stem from my autistic being and the potentially unique manner in which I absorb, assess, and audit information to formulate, rapidly, a path from current state to goal. Because I cannot explain my methods in ways that neurotypical minds can digest, there is no trust. Because I cannot there is only repetitive second-guessing and challenge, all of which mires progress. I am blamed for this, because it is easier and feels better to blame me than to acknowledge or work to eliminate the bias and discrimination.
This cultural and societal sickness is terminal, but it is a happy cancer, willingly born by humans who would rather die than accept that there is more than one path to any given goal, let alone that the most efficient and effective one so often rests beyond their individual purview.
Over the course of my thirty years of working, I have repeatedly encountered this, and in every case, months or years after my departure, the solutions recommended are finally implemented, to rousing success. Naturally, that they were my recommendations, given months or years ago, is conveniently forgotten. A profound waste of time, the exponential reality of both cost and loss over that time, and of course, the gap of innovation and success lost in that interim.
But all anyone will ever say when I attempt to express it is that ‘you just wanted the credit’. Even in the eventual acknowledgment of adoption, there is acrimony and misplaced assumptions… such is the nature of this manifestation of the double empathy problem.
These days, we are once more in the ‘cover your ass’ hiring model of degreed experience. The degree-less need not apply. Were this were my only gap to address, not that I could any more easily pass maths to achieve even my associate degree, let alone afford the bachelors or masters beyond it. So I sit here, having given up on looking for work after nearly eight years unemployed (a blip of six months in late 2022 to early 2023 left behind due to profound ablest and allistic discrimination at the hands of a company whose name is a complete irony – Right Networks).
I am bored and depressed. I feel the weight of the benefit I could provide, were anyone willing to accept and admit it exists in me; but if not ableist and allistic, then it’s the staple of gendered agism. I feel the layers of bias and discrimination like a weighted blanket. I feel the sieve of economical viability and the fact that it is involuntary and externally imposed is but one facet of this diamond of frustration and resentment.
Against the gem-wheel of dharma and ultimate lack of culpability, I slowly grind away the edges and I try to keep myself occupied with games, with animes, and with concepts of worlds and existences that more justly accept and admit me to share.
The fact that none of these exist but in the realm of commercial distribution is but another example of that at which I am, in this short piece, pointing.
Finger to the moon.